


pit stop #124

by ephemeralblossom



Category: The Amazing Race RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 16:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8333827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralblossom/pseuds/ephemeralblossom
Summary: Ten seasons into The Amazing Race, Phil hits a snag on the way to pit stop #124.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LJ_McKay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LJ_McKay/gifts).



> Written for LJ_McKay, who wanted to know "what Phil is thinking about all these crazy (and sometimes pretty cool) people" and "what he does all day". I hope you enjoy it! :)
> 
> This fic is based on [an actual incident](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ykfny/i_am_host_of_the_amazing_race_phil_keoghan_ask_me/cflarpc) during the tenth season of _The Amazing Race_. However, this is a work of fiction.

In retrospect, what surprises Phil the most is that it took this long.

(But right now, all he wants to know is why the heck it had to be _today_ of all days.)

Over the past twenty-four hours, he’s flown from Madagascar to Finland; been waist-deep in a Finnish bog; climbed deep into a Finnish limestone mine; and flown from Finland to Ukraine, where an accidentally invalid visa has brought the freight train that is _The Amazing Race_ to an abruptly screeching halt.

Now Phil slumps exhaustedly in a hard plastic airport chair, nearly convinced that the massive security guard across the gate area has been deputized to keep a beady eye on him. Obviously Phil, a soft-spoken New Zealander with heavy eyes and a bad case of jetlag, is incredibly menacing and must be supervised at all times. 

He’s not exactly sure what mayhem he’s suspected of planning. He takes stock. Tangible resources: camera crew (now buggered off to the hotel), carryon, laptop bag, bare hands. Intangible resources: gnawing hunger, lingering Finnish mud, a passionate desire for a hot shower and a soft bed. 

Bertram calls. Phil listens, eyes drooping half-closed. “If we have to,” Bertram says, “we’ll put a stand-in at the pit stop to check teams in, then have you re-film their arrivals when you get here.”

“And what if they don’t let me in the country at all?” Phil asks wearily.

Bertram is quiet for a moment. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” he says.

Phil knows they could just use a stand-in and explain the visa snafu on air. But he doesn’t _want_ to do that. He’s been at countless pit stops over the past ten seasons, and he hasn’t missed one yet. He’s not going to let a little visa problem get in the way of him making it to this one.

***

Phil’s not sure if it’s better or worse that he was the last one in the visa line (curse his habitual politeness), so nobody could stay with him to keep him company. They’re all roaming the streets of Kiev (or checked into their hotel), and he’s deciding which neck pillow in this airport gift shop looks like it might best ward off neck stiffness.

“If it helps,” Linda says in his ear, “the contestants are all camping out for the night too. Their flights don’t leave until the morning.”

Luckily their airport is Helsinki, not Kiev. Phil doesn’t mind chatting with contestants, though he doesn’t often get the chance, but he’d prefer to avoid social interaction while grumpy and jetlagged. 

He chooses a pillow and juggles the phone to his other ear. “Please make sure I’m out of here before their flights get in,” he tells her plaintively. “Or at least give me advance warning so I can stay out of their way.”

With the twist in Helsinki eliminating its pit stop and instructing the contestants to race on, spotting Phil in Kiev Airport would no doubt cause rampant confusion. He imagines a bemused flock of contestants chasing him around Kiev Airport attempting to check in, and suppresses a shiver.

“What, are you going to hide in the gents?”

“If I have to,” Phil says.

***

It’s already late, and Phil knows nothing more can be done tonight. Everyone who might be able to help has already gone home to their families, dinners, and televisions, and is extremely unlikely to be persuaded to come back into the office simply to help one hapless foreigner with a visa issue. He tells Bertram and Linda to get some rest; they can all get back to freeing him from the airport in the morning.

Despite his determination to take his predicament philosophically, though, Phil’s stomach sinks as he ends the call with Linda after telling her to open the minibar and put her feet up. There’s no minibar for him, no soft bed waiting. Oh, there’s a business lounge he could find, and it might have a hot shower – but it’s up on the departures floor, and he’s stuck down here on arrivals. He doesn’t want a shower badly enough to buy a new ticket. 

No, Phil’s going to have to rough it. He’s done it before – he’s no pampered prince, unable to take the swings and roundabouts of international travel in his stride. The first order of business is to find a power outlet, and hopefully one that’s in an area with a strong Wifi signal. His Blackberry and laptop are both nearly out of juice, and if he can’t sleep he’ll need something to do. 

The airport is a ghost town this late. Cleaners are out making their rounds, and he exchanges polite nods with them. His massive security guard is still lurking nearby; his presence makes Phil feel a bit safer. At least if someone starts trying to steal his laptop while Phil sleeps, the guard might possibly say something.

He finally settles in at a deserted gate strategically near the restrooms, with Wifi and two power outlets. Camouflaging his laptop bag underneath his jacket, he curls up as best he can, putting his sleep mask on and trying to center himself. Best to catch a few hours now, before the bustle of the new day makes that impossible. He’s run a race day on no sleep before – jet lag and insomnia are his eternal nemeses – and it’s not an experience he’d like to repeat. 

He dreams that he’s stuck in the airport for a month. He dreams that he sets up a pit stop in a deserted coffeeshop, and they turn the remainder of the season into an “Amazing Race: Ukraine,” with the contestants racing around the countryside but always ending at Boryspil International Airport in Kiev, like some eternal Groundhog Day. He dreams that eventually it’s Mary who somehow returns from elimination sequestration to become a Ukrainian border official and makes his paperwork magically go through, freeing him to fly back to the States for the final leg. He dreams that he reinstates her and David to thank her, that they win the Race, and that the rest of the teams are livid.

Then he wakes up, and he’s not in Manhattan at the finish line, but folded up in an uncomfortable position on the floor of the Kiev airport, still stuck in limbo and now with an almighty crick in his neck. 

On the plus side, he’s managed three hours of sleep and neither his Blackberry nor his laptop have been stolen. He’ll take it.

***

Phil finds the most comfortable looking chair he can – which isn’t saying much, since they’re all a) plastic and b) torture implements designed to make the traveler happy to leave them behind and squish themselves into a crowded plane. But it’s near the power outlet, and he puts his neck pillow behind his back for a bit of a cushion.

When he thinks about it, he’s not surprised that his subconscious brain picked Mary to be his rescuer. He’s periodically asked if he has “favorite teams” on the race, and he always answers honestly: yes, he does. It’s not like he can affect teams’ placements in any way – all penalties and time credits are decided by production as a whole, not by Phil himself, and non-elimination legs are decided in advance (not to save any particular team). So it’s completely legitimate for Phil to root for certain teams a little harder than others, to hope for deserving winners and not the good-for-TV assholes or bland pretty people. Nothing against assholes or blandness, exactly; but Phil will always root for an underdog.

David and Mary’s elimination in Madagascar on the last leg was unsurprising; they were Marked for Elimination, after all, and the likelihood of them finishing first and escaping the thirty-minute time penalty was always low. Phil was still sad when they arrived in the penultimate position, only to be eliminated when Lyn and Karlyn made it to the mat only ten minutes into the thirty-minute penalty. He likes Lyn and Karlyn too, but David and Mary were special. 

But that’s _The Amazing Race_. Every season there are a new group of amazing (and not-so-amazing) people, and they race around the world, showing the best and worst about themselves along the way. For every Jonathan shoving Victoria when she couldn’t run to the pit stop fast enough to please him (while carrying both of their bags), there’s a Joyce shaving her head and looking absolutely radiant – Charla and Mirna kicking butt and refusing to take any disrespect – Rob and Amber finding cheeky ways to explore the boundaries of the rules – Oswald and Danny’s classy politeness. 

This is the tenth season, and Phil will do as many as they’ll let him. Ten more, twenty more, thirty… eventually America will probably tire of it, but for now they keep falling in love with the teams and the destinations, just like Phil does. If most of America never gets their passports, never travels, Phil will show them the world through the eyes of ordinary Americans who look like them, dropped willy-nilly into the bustle of foreign lands.

(Okay, so not all the contestants look like “ordinary Americans”. They’re making TV, after all. There’ll always be a hefty dose of models and aspiring actors. But most of the teams, if Phil has anything to do with it, will be an eclectic mix. He wants more David & Marys, not fewer.)

He knows the Race has sometimes been criticized for taking too shallow of an approach, for stereotyping countries’ cultures and only skimming the surface. And perhaps that criticism is somewhat justified, although he thinks the Race does the best it can within the strictures of its format. But whenever he hears that criticism, he thinks of the wide-eyed wonder on the face of someone like a Mary, encountering the world for the first time. 

They’re doing an All-Star edition next season. They have Uchenna & Joyce coming back, and Rob & Amber, and Charla & Mirna, and Team Guido, and Danny & Oswald, and several more. Phil’s going to push for David & Mary to join them. Perhaps his dream of them crossing the finish line will still come true.

***

Morning dawns, and Phil’s visa snafu seems no closer to being solved. He forages for breakfast – a granola bar here, a large coffee there – and tries to look nonthreatening, confident, and pleasant for the benefit of the visa inspectors. 

When he emerges from his latest interview, he checks his phone to find a text from Linda: the teams are in the air from Helsinki, and their production contact in Ukraine is out of the office today with a sick child, but thinks things should be fixed up by tonight.

‘By tonight’ Phil will have missed the pit stop (unless driving tanks at the Roadblock or rapping at the Detour delays teams an unforeseen amount). But it’s something, he supposes - at least it doesn’t look like he’ll be stuck here for weeks while they peer suspiciously at his passport and look like they suspect him of dark and dastardly deeds.

“Excuse me,” a little old lady says, in German-accented English. “May I charge my laptop?”

Phil surrenders the power outlet to her without a murmur, and helps her situate her luggage and get her laptop plugged in. She tells him that her son is late – there was an accident on the roadway, two idiots playing chicken – and he commiserates with her about being stuck in an airport after a long flight. (He doesn’t tell her just how long he’s been stuck, although his personal hygiene and rumpled clothing may give him away, despite his best efforts this morning to mend the damage.) 

She pats his knee when he tells her about the visa snafu, and observes that if Ukraine would join the European Union already, these sorts of things wouldn’t happen. Apparently she herself has come under suspicion before for traveling to Ukraine too frequently to see her granddaughters, and she’s indignant about it. “What do they think I am, a drug mule?” she asks, rhetorically. “At my age? What seventy-five-year-old grandmother wants to spend her time on drugs?”

“Seventy-five?” Phil asks. “I don’t believe it. You’re not a day over sixty.”

That gets him a pat on the knee, and then she busts out her granddaughters’ baby pictures. 

Phil gives a philosophical inward shrug. Looking at baby pictures is better than reading one of the bestsellers on offer in the airport shops. Ted, one of the cameramen, has been trying to recommend _The Da Vinci Code_ for months, but Phil is skeptical.

So it’s just as Hildegard reaches the punchline of her latest story about her granddaughter Dasha’s adventures with her pet guinea pig Bogdan (despite Hildegard’s assurances that Bogdan has survived all of his adventures unscathed, Phil privately thinks that Dasha’s parents are replacing “Bogdan” periodically), that Tyler and James go flying past towards border control, followed closely by Dustin and Kandice.

“Young people these days,” Hildegard says, with a sniff. “They’ll break a leg, if they don’t run over someone first.”

Phil pretends he knows nothing about these breakneck misanthropes.

Rob and Kimberly are next, and then Lyn and Karlyn. They’re in for a long wait in the border control line – a flight from London came in twenty minutes ago, and all of those passengers are still cooling their heels – but Phil will let them find that out for themselves. 

“Excuse me,” he tells Hildegard. “I need to make some calls. Have a wonderful visit with your granddaughters, and Bogdan.”

And of course it’s just as he stands up, pulling up the handle of his suitcase and situating his laptop bag, that the Cho brothers come pelting down the escalator, only to see him and pull up in utter confusion.

“Ah,” Phil says.

Godwin recovers first and runs over to skid to a stop in front of him. “A pit stop in an airport? Wow, this is crazy.”

“This isn’t the pit stop,” Phil says, as Erwin quickly joins his brother. “Sorry.”

“Oh,” Godwin says, looking a little crestfallen. “Okay! Where’s the roadblock? Detour? Do we have to help carry twenty people’s luggage down the escalator? Shine thirty people’s shoes? Eat fifty bags of airplane peanuts?”

Phil makes a mental note not to hire Godwin to help design roadblocks and detours.

Erwin punches Godwin lightly in the shoulder. “Hey. He’s not going to tell us. We have to find the clue box.”

Godwin looks embarrassed, and then immediately starts scoping out the terminal. “Sorry, Phil! See you soon!” 

“Godwin,” Phil says, as Godwin starts to take off in a fruitless search for a clue box that will never appear. “This is just an airport. Go get in the border control line.”

Both brothers look confused.

Phil sighs. “I’m having visa issues. Go. Hopefully I’ll see you at the pit stop, but you’re just wasting time right now.”

“Sorry,” he tells Hildegard, as the brothers speed off towards border control. “Nobody walks anywhere these days.”

***

Shortly after the teams make it out of the airport, Phil’s visa comes through. A smiling woman at border control stamps his passport, and then – he’s through! Free!

His driver meets him outside. Often they go to the detour and roadblocks to film in case they want Phil narration for the finished edit, but not today. Today Phil is going to the hotel to clean up, then straight to the pit stop. They don’t have a great deal of time; some of the teams may get stuck, especially driving crappy cars over medium-long distances, but they never _all_ do.

As they drive away from the airport, Phil looks back over his shoulder. He’ll be back tomorrow morning to fly to Morocco. It never ends. (And that’s just the way he likes it.)

“How are they doing?” he asks Linda when she calls.

“We’ll probably have a breakdown or two,” she says, which was expected. The cars they gave them aren’t the best. “And they’re already making insensitive remarks about Chernobyl and hoping they don’t get third eyes.”

Phil sighs. Another day in the Race.

But at least he’s out of the airport and in the game.

***

Eighteen hours after he touched down in Kiev and the beady eye of the border control officer identified his incorrect visa, Phil makes it to the pit stop at last. 

“One hundred and twenty four,” Linda says, nonsensically, handing him a bagel.

“Sorry?”

She laughs. “We counted while you were stuck in the airport. This is pit stop number one hundred twenty four.”

That seems simultaneously too few and too many. Phil accepts the bagel. “Where are they?”

“Rapping,” she says. “Badly. Probably thirty minutes away.”

That “compose a rap about all the places you’ve been so far” Detour was evil. Phil grins. 

He pulls out his notebook as the makeup person comes over. Thirty minutes to prepare for the interviews he does at every pit stop. Thirty minutes to get his head back in the game.

Out of the five teams remaining, he has favorites. David and Mary weren’t the only team he’s been rooting for this season. The Cho brothers seem like genuinely good guys, though they don’t seem to have the competitive drive necessary to really do well. (There are only so many times you can wait around for the teams behind you to finish their tasks, even if they’re your friends.) And he finds single moms Lyn and Karlyn’s obstinate refusal to lose very inspiring. (Especially since he knows how much winning would transform their lives; that always helps a team get his support.)

But whether a team is his favorite or not, he’ll treat them just the same. This is his job, and he’s damn good at it. 

Much later that night, the Cho brothers will limp into the pit stop in a far last place, after driving down a closed street and being stopped by police. (The authorities in Ukraine seem to have it out for the show.) Phil will regretfully eliminate them, and then catch as much sleep as he can before flying to Morocco. The show will go on, and eventually Tyler and James will win, followed by Rob and Kimberly and Lyn and Karlyn. Next year David and Mary will return and continue to win both America and Phil’s hearts.

For now, Phil studies his notes, and enjoys the warmth of the sun on his skin after the pallid chill of the airport. It’s one more day on _The Amazing Race_ ; a unique day, perhaps, but one more day in the vibrant tapestry that is this fantastic show. 

Ten seasons, one hundred and twenty four pit stops (and counting) – and it never gets old.

***


End file.
